MICHAEL BRODEUR

Road worriers

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:44:57 GMT

Obscene gas prices, stolen equipment, broken vans, no sleep -- so why do bands still go on tour?
Right around this time 10 years ago, our van died in the desert plains of Arizona on some godless stretch of I-8.

Pretty & Nice: a tour diary: On the road from Oregon to Boston with New England's newest Sub Pop signees.

Tour story
Right around this time 10 years ago, our van died in the desert plains of Arizona on some godless stretch of I-8. After a long wait and a longer tow (during which I rode shotgun while the rest of the band hunkered down in the van, tilted at a 45-degree angle), we finally reached a lonely garage. There, we were given a list of our beloved Big Blue’s extensive transmission problems. In her stead, while mechanics tried to save her, we were offered a smallish egg-shaped minivan rental with which to complete the West Coast leg of our month-long tour. Desperate, late for San Diego, long since broke, and teetering on the edge of multiple forms of meltdown, we took it.

We discovered that three of us could squeeze into the front (with one straddling the gearshift), and that, with the rear seats popped out, all of our equipment could be Tetris-ed into a seamless black mass of amps and cases. In the very rear corner was a tiny cubby of empty space, where the remaining two band members could hug their knees, make like luggage, think of England, and enjoy whatever was piping through the back left speaker — of course, no one up front would hear their protests if they didn’t.

Home grown

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:34:19 GMT

The Viva La Vinal Fest blooms again
To maximize summer fun before winter comes in and ruins everything for everybody, Audrey Ryan and a committee have organized the 3rd Annual Viva La Vinal Festival.

Train gang

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:24:44 GMT

C. Kellam Scott and Richard Garet at Axiom
Julie Madden and Autumn Ahn. C. Kellam Scott and Richard Garet are a pair inspired by everyday noise, but, I’m happy to say, they’re far more inspiring.

Boston music news: September 5, 2008

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:06:22 GMT

Notes on the Dirty Truckers and the Kickbacks
I’m not one to gossip, so you didn’t hear it from me, but . . .

The shores of cool

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:36:19 GMT

Interview: Liz Phair paddles back to Guyville
I’d love to get all swept up in the hullabaloo surrounding Liz Phair’s 1993, now seminal, now reissued Exile in Guyville , I really would.

VANITY PHAIR: “I got into music at Oberlin, and half of that was because it was in fashion to do it. It was a fun little fuck-off hobby.”

I’d love to get all swept up in the hullabaloo surrounding Liz Phair’s 1993, now seminal, now reissued (on Dave Matthews’s ATO Records) Exile in Guyville, I really would. I love hullabaloos. Thing is, I’ve always been more of a Whip-Smart guy. I think the songs are better, her band sound better, and her voice throughout doesn’t inspire bullshit lines like “Lilith Sternin at Lilith Fair.” Guyville, though? Really? I’m just not sure, guys.

I say “guys” because Phair’s career was, for better or worse, built on foundations of dude approval. (Girls loved her, but guys made her.) It’s Guyville’s simmering premise, after all — well, that and responding to the Rolling Stones, and passively confessing to a crush on Nash Kato of Urge Overkill. Years later, Phair has unshelved the songs that made her who she is (to everyone else, at least), directed a rough documentary revisiting the dude-heavy Chicago scene that chewed her out while eating her up, and set out to play Guyville in its entirety at select dates around the country (this Friday and Saturday at the Paradise).

Her career has been one of constant and drastic change (or selling out, as some would have it), from the raw pop of her early “Girly Sound” cassettes to her disconcertingly high-gloss output on Capitol. After paddling away from the “shores of cool,” as she sees them, Phair is allowing the tides to draw her raft back — but is that the same as washing up? I caught up with her on the phone as she was making her son breakfast.

Was there a point when you were fed up with Guyville — the attention and the expectations it brought upon you?
I’ve always had a rough time with it. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a rock star, I didn’t grow up wanting to be on stage. I got into music (in terms of writing it) at Oberlin, and half of that was because it was in fashion to do it. I wrote my crazy little songs, but I did it in my bedroom. It was a fun little fuck-off hobby.

But I got very serious when I made Guyville. I was on a mission to prove something. I was sick of these holier-than-thou music types that, for some reason, I was surrounded with. I just wanted to be like “fuck you, I can do it too — it’s not rocket science.” Then suddenly it became the defining thing of my adult life, at least until I had a child.

The beat goes on

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:03:33 GMT

DFA’s heyday may be a whole heydecade
It’s been seven years since DFA Records authorized scads of ostensibly soulless hipsters to relax a little and shake their asses the way young people ought to.

Boston music news: August 29, 2008

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:58:32 GMT

Notes on Therefore I Am and Self-Righteous Brothers.
Attn, emo nation: prepare to claw at your tear-streaked cheeks with joyous envy.

I think I’m gonna throw down

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:55:23 GMT

The Motion Sick make us feel all woozy
Wanna get in on the music-licensing boom? Be smart like the Motion Sick.

Gnarls Barkley + Hercules and Love Affair

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:58:48 GMT

Wilbur Theatre, August 6, 2008
To the cynic, the scene milling around in front of the sold-out Wilbur could merely have been proof of the power of a hit single.

Alien lanes

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:09:22 GMT

Free candlepin Mondays at the Milky Way
By 9 pm last Monday, the Milky Way’s seven lanes were thoroughly stuffed.

Podcastic!

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:16:57 GMT

Band in Boston escapes to the web
If you’re flummoxed by the dizzying breadth of our rock scene, a good place to start deflummoxing might be the trifecta of Band in Boston podcasts.

Poni Hoax

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:19:32 GMT

Images of Sigrid | Tigersushi
Poni Hoax are, it’s clear, out to crash the increasingly humdrum post-disco party (just with better supplies), so it’s only fair that you crash theirs.

Boston music news: August 15, 2008

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:51:24 GMT

Notes on Grimis and 30 years of Boston punk
Broken River Prophets, Grimis, Basement Band, and more.

Luminous sadness

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:24:38 GMT

Alina Simone sings Yanka Dyagileva
“Part of my goal is to just fucking force Americans to listen to Russian rock.”

As indie rock extends its colonial gaze eastward, ravishing (in several senses) the musics of the Balkans, Russia, and (increasingly) Southeast Asia and Indonesia for their odd meters, gudoks, and slendro scales, you can’t help feeling that, despite all the gusto and the well-intentioned curiosity, something essential’s getting squandered in the fusion. If much of the fervor over Eastern adventures mounted by bands from Brooklyn seems charitable, meet Alina Simone — who, despite being Ukraine-born and now residing in Brooklyn, considers herself “a Boston person,” having grown up in Medford. On her newest album, Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware (54°40’ or Fight!), she may have discovered the easiest (and most difficult) strategy for preserving the power of music from elsewhere: language.

Those who see the opacity of a foreign language as prohibitive to their enjoyment have probably overdosed on shittily produced Starbucks-ready “world music.” The language barrier is no hazard when it comes to Simone, whose voice (despite an American accent that I can’t detect but that she swears is there when she sings Russian) quivers and hovers around its unfamiliar phonetic terrain while deftly conveying the dark, frustrated emotions of the songs — each one a cover of Siberian-born punk-folk singer Yanka Dyagileva. Along the way, searing guitars creep, trumpets swoon, moody backdrops unfurl, and scratchy hard-struck acoustics light up each track with arresting immediacy. It’s no act of tourism.

While living in Hoboken, Simone hopped the F-train to Brighton Beach — her first entry into a predominantly Russian community since departing Ukraine at the age of one. “I was in a state of shock,” she says, at seeing signs in Cyrillic and hearing couples conversing in Russian and, especially, the music of the street performers. They weren’t playing the “thinly veiled political songs” Simone had endured from her parents’ hi-fi. (Her father, a Russian ex-pat, fled to the US after his rejection of a KGB recruitment overture — and “flagrantly checking out of books from the library” — landed him on its blacklist.) It was straight-up indie rock, but in Russian, odd in its competing familiarities. The performers invited Simone to Manhattan’s Elbow Room, where a steady stream of Russian rock was carving out a niche. There, she was given a cassette with some Yanka songs.

Bumpin' crop

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:12:48 GMT

A summer harvest of New England Product
This Friday, August 8, our FNX homies have gathered five of Boston’s best rock bands for a spectacular blowout at the Middle East Downstairs.

Boston music news: August 8, 2008

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:55:41 GMT

Notes on Disappearer, Vagiant, the American Idols Live Tour, Steven Brodsky, and more
Three ways to feel good about going out at night — or three ways to feel like utter shit in the morning. Whichever.

Anti-Bush league

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:22:11 GMT

The No More Bush Tour rolls in
It’s crucial that we maintain clarity by holding fast to simple truths — like how our president is kind of a dick.

Late bloomer

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:48:38 GMT

George Michael at TD Banknorth Garden, July 27, 2008
Word came: “George Michael is in the building!” — and the place roared and squeed.

Boston music news: August 1, 2008

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:50:35 GMT

Notes on the Living Sea, Hangman's Alphabet, and the Luxury
Two promising local indie-rock up-and-comers have up and come out with new CDs for your enjoyment.

Out of Africa

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:58:48 GMT

Extra Golden swipe their visas
Writing about Extra Golden, you’re tempted to focus on the novelty: two indie-rock dudes taking off to Nairobi to jam with a pair of benga masters sounds like the premise for some awful Jack Black movie. (Please don’t please don’t.)

GOLD SOUNDS: The curious music of Extra Golden is a story that sounds simple but was realized only through extreme difficulty.

Writing about Extra Golden, you’re tempted to focus on the novelty: two indie-rock dudes taking off to Nairobi to jam with a pair of benga masters sounds like the premise for some awful Jack Black movie. (Please don’t please don’t.) The subsequent stateside visit to play a festival, the series of visa nightmares, and the divine intervention of Barack Obama (not joking) could make a great sequel. And the music — some hamfisted hybrid of butt rock and benga, shredded out on a tooled-up nyatiti — could be a hit soundtrack. For a week.

But the curious music of Extra Golden is a more detailed, less straightforward story that sounds simple but was realized only through extreme difficulty. It’s overtly non-ironic in approach, and utterly earnest in spirit — another tough sell in times when all musical curiosity is cut down as “co-opting.” In short, it sounds better than it sounds on paper.

Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson started the band then known as Golden 15 years ago. In an indie-rock climate that favored chilly distance over visceral kicks, Golden came on like a summer storm, with all sorts of gruff riffage and brute force. Aside from some flourishes, they didn’t sound that preoccupied with urbanized strains of African folk. But according to Minoff, “people’s interests change,” and shortly after their split in 2002, Eagleson left for Kenya to study toward his PhD in ethnomusicology.

Within a year, Eagleson grew close with vocalist Otieno Jagwasi as well as drummer Onyango Wuod Omari. After some successful jammage, he invited Minoff to visit him in Nairobi. And though this, the birth of Extra Golden (who come to the MFA this Wednesday), would be the part where things get a little wacky in our movie version, Minoff was surprised at how normal much of it seemed.

“There are a lot of similarities between benga and rock. The chords are the same; the bands have the same set-up; they’re playing every night in clubs.” And the clubs themselves, though open to the elements, weren’t so different from the sparsely outfitted basements every indie-rocker knows well. The resulting album, Ok-Oyot System (Thrill Jockey), glowed with a let’s-do-this attitude (it was recorded outside with a laptop, a couple of mics, and one amp), and also a enchanting simplicity (benga typically relies on a single key, repetitive rhythms, and trickling guitars). That the music’s greatest feat was its modesty didn’t tickle wacky expectations. And the AIDS-related death of founding member Otieno Jagwasi before the album was released lingered as a dour reminder of the realities beyond the bio.